Fire Risk Map

1. Introduction

Since the industrial revolution, the temperature on earth has been steadily rising. Global emission of CO₂ is at the heart of this problem and are widely known as the cause of what is called the Greenhouse Effect. Higher temperatures are causing longer and more extreme periods of drought and more intense fire seasons. In the drier areas of the world, forest fires are a widely known phenomenon with yearly reoccurring events. Australia, for example, is extremely susceptible to bushfires due to its hot and dry climate. Fire thrives in these conditions because it provides dry air, hot temperatures and a great amount of fuel with low moisture content. But as global warming continues to rise, dry areas are no longer the only places affected by wildfires. Like Indonesia, which usually has a wet, tropical climate, but has been experiencing long periods of droughts, resulting in an increase in extreme forest fires. Research has linked this increase to both global warming and also to more extreme El Niño events. El Niño is a weather phenomenon that happens every few years when trade winds from the east lessen and humid air (which causes rain) moves away from the Indonesian coast, causing periods of extreme drought. Recent studies have shown that global warming is causing this phenomenon to be more extreme. During the El Niño period of 2015, a thousand megatons of CO₂ got released into the atmosphere as a result of Indonesian forest fires, which burned nearly 0,4 million hectares of forest down.

Both global warming and droughts caused by El Niño are not the direct cause of forest fires, they only provide ideal circumstances for fire to thrive. Forest fires usually start as a result of human activity. For example, in Indonesia it is common practice to burn down plots of forest to create more farming land. But forest fires can also start because of human errors like a campfire that grows out of control or a cigarette that’s not properly thrown away. The second and less common way that fires start is by lightning, but this rarely is the case. In this module, these factors will all be combined and taken into account to create a viable risk map. This risk map is meant to show which areas are most prone to forest fires during periods of drought. In this module you will be learning how to use QGIS to create this risk map. You will learn what steps need to be taken to find and prepare data, how to use this data to do analyses and how to reclassify and combine multiple maps into a complete risk map.